They are filming on the Flight Deck now- as I type they are doing a scene with Cillian Murphy, Chris Evans, Troy Garity and Benedict Wong.
The Flight Deck is the most ‘tecchy’ of all the sets. There are monitors, wires, dials and switches everywhere. The ceilings are low, the space is cramped… but, oh, the captain’s chair is comfortable.
There is absolutely nothing cooler here than wandering around on the spaceship.
They’ve been filming some of the Zero G scenes so the big main set is empty. It’s huge and cramped and beautiful and industrial and certainly much better lit than a real spaceship.
Once you’re inside you are completely immersed in the world. It’s entirely enclosed. There are no windows. Everything there looks like it has a function except, of course, for the little human touches. A pair of socks on the floor. A photograph of a family. A tiny basketball hoop on the wall. A hairband on on the shelf next to the bed.
There’s a kind of sad feeling to the empty set. It feels like it’s been abandoned.
Since Wednesday they’ve been filming ‘zero G’ stuff with the stunt doubles in space suits connected to wires. I went down to the studio just before lunchtime to have a look at what they were filming. Right as I arrived Danny Boyle ran off to another set for a few minutes.
When I first met Danny a couple months ago I recognised him the first second I saw him. While we were talking with Andrew Macdonald, I couldn’t stop trying to think of all the directors I know by sight. They were asking me serious questions about the web and I had ‘Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg, Lucas, Hitchcock, Houston, Cronenberg, Lee, Herzog, Tarantino, Allen, Boyle…’ running through my head.
Oh. Apparently, they’ve just now decided to re-shoot everything they’ve shot with the space suits over the past couple days. They’ve said they want to make it look better.
No one here is going to make do with ‘good enough’, everything has got to be amazing.
They’re filming on the Airlock set today. I really love this set a lot. Even though it’s the most basic, industrial-looking set, it gives one the feeling of being on a real spaceship more so than any of the other sets. There’s nothing there other than big doors with big handles and harsh, bright lights, but one feels like the vastness of space is only mere metres away.
We wanted to take our video cameras onto the set while they were filming, but because it’s such a small, cramped space, we were politely asked not to film.
We were determined to film that set…
“Fifty years from now, the sun is dying, and mankind is dying with it. Our last hope: a spaceship and a crew of eight men and women. They carry a device which will breathe new life into the star. But deep into their voyage, out of radio contact with Earth, their mission is starting to unravel. There is an accident, a fatal mistake, and a distress beacon from a spaceship that disappeared seven years earlier. Soon the crew are fighting not only for their lives, but their sanity.”
Here we go…
